


Had They Been Drinking?

by merriman



Category: Black Books (TV)
Genre: Don't copy to another site, Drinking, First Meetings, Gen, Wine, getting drunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 20:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17148797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merriman/pseuds/merriman
Summary: Fran's been laid off and dumped and Bernard is already drunk. They don't know each other yet, but they will.





	Had They Been Drinking?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [edna_blackadder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edna_blackadder/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I hope you enjoy this treat!

He was drunk. Fran was drunk too, but goodness, that man was drunk. He had to be. She'd been watching him for an hour and he'd somehow gotten through two bottles of wine on his own. Now, Fran could put it away. She was currently working on a bottle of her own and she was pleased to note she'd managed about two thirds so far and was feeling pleasantly buzzed. Okay, more than buzzed. She was definitely drunk. 

Not drunk enough to go over and talk to the far-drunker-than-her man. No. But drunk. Yes.

Fran poured herself a little more wine and sighed. She needed a boyfriend. She needed a boyfriend and a new job and probably a cute pair of shoes. She also probably needed to stop drinking this wine, but it was already paid for and who was going to stop her? No one, that was who.

Across the pub, the man with the two bottles of wine now had a third. He was talking to no one and nothing and Fran definitely wasn't listening. 

She was totally listening.

"But you see, the problem is… the problem. It's a problem," the man was saying. "Because problems just happen, you know? They're caused by people. And people are always _around_! Doing things!"

He wasn't wrong. Fran found herself nodding along with his ranting. Then she found herself standing up. Oh. That could well be a very big mistake. Standing, that was. That required balance and balance required perhaps a skosh more sobriety than Fran had held onto. She waited, looked around, then picked up her own bottle of wine and her glass and attempted to walk over to the man's table.

While she made her way over there, she appraised him. He wasn't horrible-looking. Unkempt, yes. But not horrible. He could do with a shower and a shave and a comb, and maybe some clothes that had been washed. Ever. But there was a certain charm about him, wasn't there?

Fran stopped by his table and gestured to an empty chair with her glass. 

"Mind if I sit?" she asked. 

The man stopped his muttering and looked up at her.

"What? Yes. I'm drinking."

Well. That hadn't been at all what Fran had been expecting. What did one do when this happened? She looked around the pub now, but her old table had been taken and now here she was, drunk and standing there with a bottle in one hand and glass in the other, having just been utterly rejected by a drunken man who apparently didn't know how to comb his own hair. If Fran was going to be honest with herself, it was a new and fascinating low for her.

"Well. Fine. I'm just going to go… finish this… somewhere else…" Fran muttered. 

She was just turning away when a hand grabbed the bottle she was holding. His hand. The man had grabbed her wine. That was just rude, really. Fran yanked it away from him.

"You've got a whole new bottle of your own!" she told him. "Drink that!"

"Oh! Perfect, a whole bottle."

The man picked up the bottle on the table and poured more into his glass, then gestured at the empty chair across from himself. "Join me!"

Fran might have hesitated, but she really didn't feel up to staying in an upright position for much longer. So she sat down. 

"I'm Fran," she told the man. 

"Whatever. Wine," he said, reaching for the bottle again, even though he hadn't had a sip from what he'd poured yet. Fran pushed one of the empties towards him, then watched as he topped up his glass with nothing.

"What was I saying?" he asked. 

Fran sipped her own wine and shrugged. "People?"

"Fuck 'em," he said.

"Agreed." Yeah. He might be an unkempt drunken freak, but at least he was an unkempt drunken freak with views she agreed on.

"What do you do?" the man asked suddenly. Fran had the distinct feeling that he'd managed to sober up maybe fifty percent in the past ten seconds. It was terrifying.

"Me?" Fran frowned and topped up her own glass. "Nothing, presently. I was working in sales."

"Me too," the man said. "Sales. I think. I mean, I'm supposed to sell things. Mostly I don't. Because of people."

Fran finished off her bottle of wine and started pouring from whichever one still had something in it. This was going to be a long night, but what did it matter? She didn't have work in the morning, did she?

* * *

The following week was horrible. Fran didn't go back to that particular pub. She'd been so very ill the next morning and she was at least fifty percent certain that she hadn't even gotten a good kiss out of the deal. She hadn't even gotten the man's name. She had, however, learned about his views on a wide variety of authors, those mobile phones everyone had now, and why it should be a crime to eat chips without vinegar.

So no, Fran was not going back to that pub. She was going to get out there and find a job and then she could tell her mum that she was fine and maybe she'd stop asking about Fran not having a boyfriend.

It took her five days to land the interview at Rags. The clothing shop was full of horrible outfits no one should ever wear and Fran was required to wear at least one item from the shop whenever she was working. So she bought five scarves and figured she could swap them out. With her first week's pay, she bought herself two bottles of Life Cry. None of her friends would come round to drink it with her, so Fran stashed one in a cupboard as a gift for the future and drank one on her own.

Fortunately, she didn't have work the next day. She went anyhow, because she was still a little drunk when morning came round and she'd forgotten what day it was, but she covered for it by buying a leopard print velvet belt with a rhinestone buckle and putting it on immediately.

"I just had to have it," she told her coworker, who nodded in agreement and rung her up at a steep discount.

Fran left the shop and made a right turn, then another right turn, then stumbled through the door of the bookshop next door. She'd known there was a bookshop there. People came into Rags every so often to complain about the owner. The first time it had happened, Fran had tried to explain that the clothing shop had nothing to do with the bookshop, but people didn't seem to care. They just went on and on about it and Fran had found herself thinking back to that man in the bar. People were the problem, he'd said.

But now here she was, in the bookshop from hell, apparently, and inside it… well. It wasn't that bad. Sure, there was a sticky spot near the door and it took Fran a full two minutes to unstick her new shoes from it. But there were also just absolute mountains of books. They towered. Okay, yes, there was also a smell. Fran wasn't sure what it was. It was sweet, but smoky, but also maybe moldy? Or perhaps burnt? As she walked around the shop she tried to figure it out, but she just couldn't put her finger on it.

"No! Get out! I never want to see you in here again! You are a pox upon this land!"

That voice. Fran looked over at the desk at the end of the shop and there he was. The man from the pub. He was standing and pointing at the door while he yelled at a man who stood in front of him.

"But it's a perfectly reasonable question!" the man insisted. 

"Well I'm not a reasonable person!" the man from the pub responded. "Get out! Out out out!"

He came around the front of the desk holding a broom in his hand and made shooing gestures with it. The customer took that cue to leave. Quickly.

"Oh God, what do you want?" The man had turned his attention to Fran now and she froze. "Look! I'm engaged, okay? I'm engaged and I don't care how good it was!"

A few other customers in the store were staring now and Fran felt obliged to explain herself. Or maybe it was the remnants of the Life Cry in her system. Whatever.

"It was nonexistent!" she yelled back. "Nothing happened! We just drank more wine than should be humanly possible and got kicked out of the pub and we went to my place but then you said you needed to go feed your snails and left!" 

Perhaps that wasn't as good a defense as she'd thought it would be. But the man at the desk was thinking now and the customers were going back to their books and Fran had the uneasy realization that this might be a very commonplace sort of thing for this shop and this man.

"Right," he said finally, going back to sit at the desk. He pulled out a bottle of wine and set it on the desk in front of himself, then brought out two glasses to join it. "Have a seat," he told her. "The rest of you! Fuck off!"

No one did, but also no one was bothering them, so Fran sat down and took the glass of wine he was offering.

"Bernard," he told her. "My name. It's Bernard."

She had a feeling he didn't remember her name. That was okay. She probably wouldn't have remembered his if he'd told her.

"Fran," she said. "I work next door."

"It's going out of business," Bernard told her. "Not next week, but it'll go under in a month or so. They all do."

"Really?" Fran asked. "Damn. I just started."

"Do yourself a favor," Bernard said to her as he leaned back and set his feet on the desk. "Get as much as you can out of the place, then sell it all later. And apply to the next place that opens. That's what the others do."

Fran considered that and nodded, then reached over to clink her glass against his.

"Bernard? I think this is going to be a halfway-decent friendship."


End file.
